The Hidden Roles of Your Mother Tongue in Learning Foreign Languages

Discover how your native language can help you identify strengths, transfer experiences and accelerate fluency.

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Your mother tongue is living proof of your ability to learn and use languages. If you can understand and express yourself in one language, you are already well on your way to acquiring more.

In this article, we will discuss why your mother tongue plays such an important role in language learning and how you can use this to your advantage when learning a foreign language.

The main ideas of this article are as follows:

• It reflects your personality.
• It serves as an anchor.
• It helps you identify your strongest and weakest abilities.
• It provides relatable and transferable experiences.
• It reveals similarities and differences with the target language.

Learning a foreign language does not mean you need to forget your mother tongue completely. It is already a big part of who you are, shaping your thoughts, habits and the life you are experiencing now. In many ways, your mother tongue becomes the foundation upon which you build your target language.

It reflects your personality

You grew up with your mother tongue, and it has shaped the person you are today. Being aware of this is essential because it allows you to create a mental copy of yourself in your target language. Your reactions, ways of thinking, habits and preferences can all be transferred into your new language, reducing the effort required to develop this new skill.

Pay attention to the way you talk, the expressions you use and how you react to things that happen around you. These are the elements you should start with when learning a new language because they are already part of your identity.

This approach feels natural and does not involve creating a completely new identity at this early stage of the process. Instead of trying to become someone else when speaking a foreign language, you gradually learn to express the same version of yourself through a different linguistic system.

It serves as an anchor

When you are a baby acquiring your mother tongue, you rely heavily on direct sensory experience to develop your understanding of language. Concept creation is slower because you need to process messages and create meaning with very little knowledge about the world.

As an adult learner, however, you already possess a notion of meaning and a vast number of concepts onto which you can anchor the new language system. You already know what emotions, relationships, routines and social situations are. The challenge is no longer creating meaning from scratch, but learning how your target language expresses meanings you already understand.

Any concept, idea or structure that you come across in your target language will therefore be easier to understand thanks to the repertoire you already possess. This previous knowledge acts as a bridge between what you already know and what you are trying to learn.

Identify your strongest and weakest abilities

Your mother tongue can provide valuable insights into the communicative skills you naturally excel in.

If you are an avid reader in your mother tongue, it will probably be easier to develop the same skill in your target language. Likewise, if you find writing or speaking easy in your mother tongue, chances are you will develop these skills more quickly in the foreign language as well.

One mistake many people make is forcing themselves to develop a skill in the target language that is not even a strength in their mother tongue.

For example, I was not a passionate reader when I was young. I had to make a lot of effort just to read ten pages per week. When I was asked to read books or articles in my target language, I found it doubly challenging. I had to deal with two issues simultaneously: understanding the content I was learning and putting in extra effort to develop a communication skill from scratch.

Weak communication skills provide signals and cues that indicate what your next focus should be and how you can connect your strongest skill to develop your weakest one. For instance, someone who speaks confidently but struggles with writing may benefit from speaking about ideas first before attempting to write them down.

Understanding your strengths and weaknesses helps you create a more realistic and efficient learning strategy instead of following methods that may not suit your natural tendencies.

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Relatable and transferable experiences

Think about all the events and experiences you have had. They are an important part of who you are, and some of them may even have defined you.

Now, can you describe an experience you have never had? Can you connect with the description of an event when you have no idea what it is about?

Can you imagine what it is like to deal with a situation in a migration office, especially if you have never been abroad?

Probably not completely. This means you need to draw on your existing experiences and transfer them into your target language. You will start to notice that these mental copies become more meaningful, enriching your learning process.

You are not simply memorising sentences and structures for the sake of memorisation. They stay with you longer because you can relate to them emotionally or personally. This is what effective content in the target language should do: connect new language with meaningful personal experience.

The more emotionally connected you are to what you are learning, the easier it becomes to remember and use it naturally.

Consider similarities and differences with the target language

Languages belong to families, and languages within the same family often share important characteristics that make them easier to learn.

For example, I found it easier to learn Italian because it is similar to Spanish. Identical words, meanings and grammatical structures made the process much easier and allowed me to recognise patterns quickly.

The differences, on the other hand, are equally enriching because they show you the areas you need to work on in order to develop fluency. They also make you more aware of how your mother tongue works.

Returning to the Spanish–Italian example, learning Italian helped me differentiate between the pronunciation of /V/ and /B/, and between /Z/ and /S/. It also taught me how to pronounce double consonants more accurately.

It was not only my target language that improved; my mother tongue also changed, improving the way I used it. Consequently, I also improved the way I learned my target language.

Language similarities and differences clearly show you what you can rely on and what requires more attention in order to become successful. They create awareness, and awareness accelerates learning.

To conclude

Your mother tongue can be used as a diagnostic tool to identify your strengths and weaknesses and to determine what to focus on first and what to develop next.

As you progress, you will notice that your mother tongue and target language constantly interact with each other. You will find that you can make mental copies faster, relate to experiences more easily and express yourself with greater confidence. In many cases, the two languages will even improve one another, sharpening your overall communication skills.

You will gradually understand why they work in this way and how you can use both the differences and the similarities to your advantage.

Most importantly, you may notice a slight change in your personality.

Do not worry, it is one of the hidden rewards of learning another language that very few people talk about.

Happy learning!

Follow me for more content on language learning Esteban Ramirez

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